


Get it Right

by HelloAfternoon



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 23:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6097580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAfternoon/pseuds/HelloAfternoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe says "I love you" as often as he says "hello," and Finn has never understood it. When Poe leaves on a routine mission, Finn takes the opportunity to test those words out and find out all the things that they can mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get it Right

The first time Poe says it, he says it with a mouth full of food and raucous laughter. Honestly, Poe Dameron thinks most things are funnier than they actually are; or he acts like he does, anyway.

“Oh, Finn,” he giggles, swallowing his food and wiping a gleeful tear from the corner of his glittering eye. “I love you, y’know that?”

And that’s that.

Finn learns that some people-people like Poe, who has never been one to skimp on affection-say they love people and things all the time. The list of shit that Poe loves is as long as it is dense, populated by various baby animals, most people he has ever met, “cute” inanimate objects, and every single flying vehicle to ever be invented. Finn is confused and nervous for a while before he figures this out, realizes that it’s normal, and that Poe wasn’t confessing some undying eternal love for him like they do in holovids. It was just an…”I love you,” which is apparently a thing people say to each other in the normal world. 

Still, Finn can’t manage to say it himself. He's just never done it before. He tries it once with Rey, and because of the way he says it-because he’s not Poe Dameron, who has had a lot of practice at loving things-she gets all weird, ad he realizes that he sounds too serious, or too uncomfortable, or...too real, or something like that. So he stops saying that he loves people and things because he can’t do it right. He figures maybe, if he says it in his head enough, he’ll say it out loud one time and get it just right. Like Poe does.

“You’re just too genuine about it, pal,” Poe says over a wad of clean laundry when Finn brings it up to him. He’s sitting in Poe’s quarters-nicer than his, those of a treasured commander and friend-with his legs crossed on the bed, about to help him fold laundry. He’s quite good at folding laundry, and Poe-who just tosses it all onto the bed and lets it lay there-is quite bad at it.

“Genuine?”

“I mean,” Poe backtracks, frowning and gazing upward, hand twiddling with the curly hairs at the back of his neck like they might give him the answer, “not that being genuine is _bad,_ you just sound like you really mean it, y’know?”

“You don’t mean it?” Finn asks.

Poe just laughs that bright, loud mouthed laugh of his that pushes laugh lines into his cheeks and shows off the little gap between his front teeth. “Yeah, of course I mean it, but. . . when you say it, it sounds like ‘I’m in love with you,’ in stead of ‘you’re a great friend,’ or ‘i really like being around you.’ You're so intense about everything.”

Finn sighs, shaking his head, and yanks the shirt out of Poe’s hands before the pilot wads it into a ball and throws it into his dresser as is. Finn, who has had everything he has ever done refined to an art, knows how to be efficient about storage. He knows which way the thumbs on gloves should point when you fold them, how to perform a series of short folds on a shirt and then roll it up to conserve space. Poe considers it witchcraft.

The clothing feels pleasantly warm and clean in his hands. He’s getting used to some things about being free. Folding his few articles of clothing, washing his few dishes; he _loves_ doing those things. Everyone else seems to consider them a chore, but Finn has never been able to enjoy doing his own laundry or picking his own toothpaste. He still messes up sometimes. It’s the little things, he thinks, that really make this different from Starkiller. It’s in-between the training and the new recruits and the mourning of the dead.

He rolls Poe’s shirt up. It’s the laundry and the “I love you”s that he can never get right.

“You know, if you keep coming over here to help me with this shit I’m gonna have to start paying you wages,” Poe grouses, finally sitting down on the bed and helping Finn as best he can (poorly).

“Credits won’t do me much good,” Finn says, “It’s not like I’m gonna need to buy a house or something any time soon.”

“You don’t just buy houses with credits,” Poe snorts. “You buy. . . food, and those little plastic girls in bikini’s to put in your ship.”

“ _You_ buy those. I don’t think anyone else buys those.”

“I love souvenirs,” Poe says, faux angry.

“Why do the souvenirs have to be tiny plastic women?” Finn grouses, “You could get. . . I don’t know, something useful!”

“You don’t really know what a souvenir is, do you?”

"It’s a thing you get from a place to remind you of that place,” Finn insists, not ready to be condescended by a man who buys fruity scented shampoo.

"Or the people there," Poe adds.

At that exact moment, BB-8 bangs into the door of Poe’s room. Finn knows it’s the droid because he’s grown to recognize its shrill little voice.

“BeeBee, try not to give yourself a concussion,” Poe grouses to himself, getting up from the bed to go open the door.

Sure enough, the droid is outside, and when Poe bends down to greet it, he says “Hey, lil’ buddy!”

After that, Poe goes on a recon mission. It's completely routine, nothing to write home about. Like always, there’s a detached feeling of concern that flits over Finn’s mind. That never really goes away. When he was a stormtrooper, it was one of the very few things he was punished for. He was always worried.

He worried about Nines, about Slip. They’re dead now, but he remembers them vividly. He remembers them better than he knew them, even if they didn’t like him, didn’t trust him. He looks back sometimes and wonders if he couldn’t have taken Slip with him. But then again, Slip is dead, so fuck that. People die, so fuck it.

He just has to trust those around him and know that death comes for everyone. That’s all there is. You live and you die, whether it be at the business end of a TIE fighter or by falling down and hitting your head on a rock.

It doesn’t matter, he thinks that night, holding one of Poe’s shirts in his fists so tight that the fabric feels hot. Everyone dies.

“I love you,” he tries again, on Rey, who he doesn’t see nearly often enough despite her semi-frequent presence on the base.

She stops chewing her sandwich and stares at him.

“That was good,” she compliments. He sighs, relieved, and grins at her, and she grins back amiably, all stars and pretty white teeth. Her smile is as pure as it is vicious. Those teeth bared mean either pure joy or an imminent asskicking, and Finn has come to respect Rey’s complicated mouth like it might deliver a death sentence.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, stuffing the rest of her sandwich in her mouth. They’re sitting in the hangar, unusually devoid of pilots. Rey is almost always out and about with Luke Skywalker, but when she’s back Finn is allowed to have these quiet, pretty moments with her. She’s grounded. She’s smart. Finn feels good when he’s around her. She's like him; there’s no judgement.

She’s a messy eater and has to suck the bits of food off her fingertips, licking her lips and thinking quietly to herself. Finn can always see it on her face when she’s thinking hard.

“I love you too,” she says, all intense and genuine like she is, staring straight at him.

He laughs. “That wasn’t very good,” he says.

“I thought it was fine,” she shrugs, not nearly as affected by that as he has been for the past few weeks. “You can’t love someone incorrectly.”

“Yeah, but if you say it wrong, they'll think you're a creep.”

“Finn,” she says, suddenly, “do you want to kiss?”

Finn's eyebrows migrate slowly up his face.

“What brought this on?” he asks, somewhat nervous.

“I mean, have you ever kissed anybody?”

"No, never,” he says, shaking his head. Honestly, it was never even on his list of shit to do. He was sanitation. You clean before you. . . fraternize, and you don’t fraternize at all. So that was that.

But this is this.

“Me either,” Rey says. “I think that’s normal for me, but you’re older, right? Shouldn’t you have kissed someone?”

“Do you want to kiss or not?” Finn huffs. He’s been thinking about kissing Rey since he met her. It’s just-now that it’s happening, it’s not all that thrilling at all. It’s what he imagines a first kiss is like, only he and Rey are supposed to be fourteen and jammed into a closet somewhere, with normal childhoods and normal upbringings.

“Fine,” Rey groans, which is not how a person is supposed to react to a kiss proposition. Finn snorts and laughs even when she leans in and kisses his smiling mouth.

“Rey, I think you’re supposed to have an actual reason for kissing someone,” he says as she grabs his face, puckering his lips, and kissing him again. He laughs again and it gets spit on her fingers and she draws back, frowning.

“I know that,” she says. “Just figured I’d try it out with you in stead of some stranger, see how it felt. Is that not okay with you?”

"No, no, it’s fine. I’m honored.”

“First kiss?”

“First kiss,” Finn replies, wondering why he was nervous.

He leans over and kisses her briefly on the mouth. Then she laughs, but he doesn't know why. Finn does, in all honestly, feel a little bit honored. She tucks one of her hands into his pocket and leans onto his shoulder, and he hopes hell see her again as soon as possible.

Finn spends a lot of time in the gym and in training. It’s been a lot of work to get his body back to where it used to be, but now that it is, he’s determined to climb the ladder. He’s not entirely confident in his own skills yet-though his performance is top notch, as close to perfect as it can get without being superhuman-because of a lot of things. He thinks about Slip every time he’s behind a blaster, and he can’t hide in his own mind any more.

He can’t think of this as a game he’s good at these days. It’s not just a simulation, even when it is. It’s not just target practice, it’s killing practice. He knows that now. This isn’t some game where he gets the high score and Phasma rewards him, this isn’t a toy, these people are real. Stormtroopers are people, and someday soon, he will be expected to kill them for his cause. His brother and sisters. They were taken from their homes, just like him. Every day he mourns their loss, every day he wonders why he was the one that got to leave, what he did to deserve this.

He walks out into the night air one evening, after the mess hall has cleared out. He's in his pajamas and he can’t sleep. Rey is out, Poe is gone, his other friends-Jess, Snap, the whole crew-are probably in bed early. They’re mostly pilots and they have drills early tomorrow morning.

D’qar is wilderness. The starlight is unpolluted, and when he looks up, he sees only the absence of Starkiller. Hosnian Prime. So much. So much is missing.

“I love you,” he says, out loud and up at those stars. He says it because thinking it is making him crazy. That’s the thing, that it’s a kind of love. It’s a kind of grief.

His is a family of subjugation, of suffering, of entrapment. It is not the kind of family he has here, with his friends, with Rey, with Poe. It’s the kind of family he was born into, the one he didn't get to choose, the one that he escaped. He grieves those who died because they never had the chance he had. He feels as guilty as he does happy.

“Finn?” a voice says. He turns and finds Jess standing under lamplight in her pajamas. “What are you doing out here? It’s fucking freezing,” she says.

He looks down at himself, and feels it suddenly. Yeah, it’s really cold.

“Yeah, it is,” he says.

"Get back inside you fucking idiot. You have drills tomorrow, too,” she says, visibly concerned. “What’re you doin’ out here, looking like somebody kicked your puppy?” she asks, walking alongside him back to his barracks, even though she doesn’t live in the same area and certainly doesn’t have to escort him.

Finn shrugs. He wants to tell her.

“Nothin’,” he says. “Just watching the stars.”

The stars now include Hosnian prime, no longer a planet but a smoldering ghost, the newborn second star in its system.

But she seems to know, anyway, that way that people here with all their social grace seem to always know everything. When they reach the door to his room, she looks at him, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail, her large eyes trained on him.

“You know, we all lost people,” she says, quietly. “We might not be close with the New Republic, but they were on our side. Our allies. The big numbers, all those lives, make it seem impersonal, but at the end of the day. . . ” she sighs and applies a friendly slap to his lower back. “Don’t be a stranger if you need to talk.”

She turns to walk away.

“Hey, Jess?” Finn says. She turns back to look at him, all tired and worn down, shivering slightly. He smiles. “Love you.”

She stares at him for a moment, and then laughs, waving a hand at him. “Yeah, yeah, you fuckin’ goof. Go to bed.”

The day that Poe returns, the pilots are in uproar over it. They always get loud when somebody comes back alive, all shouting at each other and jumping into each other and generally being rowdy while General Organa tries to calm the room and deliver news. It doesn’t work.

Finn sprints out onto the landing strip, pushing past pilots who grouse at him or laugh at his enthusiasm. Poe’s ship-yes, there it is, the big X-wing with BB-8 notched neatly into the top of it like an exceptionally tiny hat-is about to fly into the hangar. The pilots whoop and scream as Poe pulls some ridiculous maneuver overhead, the engines of the X-wing squealing like a passing artillery shell.

“Get off the landing strip you bunch of savages!” someone shouts.

They all scatter out of the way as Poe’s ship meanders in at a steady pace, landing gear deployed, before it stills, folds, huffs out a final, exhausted breath, and goes quiet in the hangar.

There’s clapping and cheering and general joy. Fin doesn’t know how hard he’s smiling, how relieved he is, until he feels Jess’s arm around his shoulder. She jumps up to kiss him on the cheek and he can’t even react.

The cockpit opens as twenty or so pilots crowd around, Finn part of the group. The size of the x-wing make sit impossible to see Poe from the angle, but he hears his voice when he shouts “it was a routine recon mission, all of you shut up!” from somewhere up above. He is met with even louder cheer.

Assured that Poe is fine, some of the pilots wander off. A medical droid rolls up, ready to take him in for mandatory screening.

“Poe Dameron!” Finn shouts up.

“Finn!” This time, Poe’s head does appear, poking out with his giant helmet on and grinning a bright, twinkly grin.

“Jump!” Finn says, without really thinking, and Poe, in stead of asking "how high,” just fucking jumps.

Finn catches him, almost dropping him but not quite. He suddenly has an armful of Poe Dameron, who is cackling his ass off. Finn is briefly baffled that he actually caught him, but is knocked out of that particular stunned silence when Poe wraps his whole body around him, arms and legs and neck, and hugs so tight Finn thinks he might get crushed.

Poe’s helmet knocked him in the head a little bit, and that's what he’s going to blame for the lightheadedness.

He’s smiling. There are tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. He hears the other pilots laughing and clapping, but only barely, only barely over the beat of his own heart and the feel of the exact way Poe’s ankles, covered in thick leather boots, lock behind his back.

“Hey, am I gonna get in on this? Finn, you're hogging him!" Jess shouts, and then he has another set of arms around him, and then a third larger set, which are sweaty. Snap, he assumes.

Every life is a victory. Every return is a triumph. This is a family of love, of necessity, of choice.

Finn finally puts Poe down once things start to get a little sweaty and uncomfortable, only to get breathes at by the pilot, whose helmet is crooked and who has grown a slight beard.

“You look really weird,” is the first thing that comes out of Finn’s mouth, unbidden.

“You look amazing,” Poe breathes, starry eyed and exhausted.

“Welcome back, Dameron,” Jess says, giving him a quiet salute, which he returns. Finn can’t stop watching him, can’t quite take his eyes off his face.

“Finn, you okay, buddy?” Poe finally asks, putting his hand on Finn’s shoulder.

Finn shakes his head. “Just really happy to see you,” he says, and his voice is a little weaker and more wet around the edges than he’d like, a clear precursor to crying.

Poe rips his helmet off-his hair is a sweaty, mashed down mess-and grabs the back of Finn’s neck with his rough, gloved hand, slightly too hard because he’s used to gripping the controls on the X-wing. He kisses Finn’s cheek hard, grinning from ear to ear.

“Glad to be back, Finn.”

Then the medical droid buts in and Poe has to go, dragged off in his horrible orange jumpsuit to be prodded, asked a series of moderately invasive questions, and hopefully returned to Finn.

Finn hates waiting. He can’t even enjoy doing his dishes (not that there are more than two to be done) because he’s too busy hoping that Poe will be released soon. Without Rey here, he feels a little lonely. Not completely, he has people like Jess and Snap, but friends like Poe and Rey are...special. They’re different. He likes having them here, and while usually at least one is around, both have been gone for quite a while.

He worries too much like he always has and probably always will.

He doesn’t wait long, though, because Poe shows up on his doorstep, freshly showered and clad in his civilian clothes. BB-8, for once, is not hot on his trail.

“Poe!” Finn says, again, and hugs him around his bony shoulders. Poe laughs and pats his back, his body warm from being under hot water. Finn ushers him inside. His quarters are small, but Poe has never seemed to mind at all.

“It’s so good to be back,” Poe says, stretching his arms over his head. He’s managed to avoid shaving since Finn last saw him just over two hours ago.

“It’s good to have you back,” Finn agrees. He's not sure how to breach the “I'm glad you aren't dead" subject, so he just doesn’t. In stead, he watches as Poe messes around in his things. There isn’t much in his room besides neatly stacked items. Only one chair, no mess. No clutter. No anything.

“Oh!” Poe says, suddenly, so loudly that Finn almost jumps out of his skin. Poe jams his hand into the pocket of his pants, rummaging around-they’re deep, apparently-before drawing out…

A tiny, plastic, bikini-clad woman.

“Here,” he says, presenting it to Finn proudly as a golden retriever might present a particularly impressive stick.

Finn is smiling helplessly when he reaches out and lets Poe roll the awful little figure into his hand. He brings it close and examines it. When he shakes it, her disconnected upper half dances. He laughs at it and Poe laughs at him.

“Where’d you get this?” he finally asks. It has a poor paint job; one of her bikini cups is way up on her collarbone, and her entire face has been printed very slightly to the left of where an ordinary human face should be.

Poe shrugs. “I have a collection, figured you needed to get some souvenirs of some kind going. I mean, _look_ at this place. It’s not a sty at all,” he scolds. “Make a mess, Finn.”

Finn tosses her onto the desk, where she clicks and skids to a stop.

“Good start,” Poe approves. Finn already wants to pick her up, straighten her, and set her neatly in an unoccupied corner of the desk, but resist the desire to do so. He can always fix it later.

Finn shifts on his feet. This feels weird. It’s weirdly normal, but totally not. Somehow, even thought his conversation, these circumstances, are completely typical, there’s something in the air. Something like relief, like just. . . knowing that he’s alive. Every time is a risk, every time he might not come back. What if this time has been the last? Even if Finn knows in his head that everyone dies, his heart doesn’t seem to get the message. There’s a difference between thinking something and knowing something.

He walks forward and pulls Poe into another embrace, a little starved for contact. The pilot must be getting sick of them by now, Finn thinks, even though that makes no sense because nobody loves attention like Poe Dameron does.

“I missed you,” Finn says into Poe’s neck. His hair smells like his crappy fruit shampoo. Poe hugs him back, less feverishly this time, savoring the moment. It does feel like that, like savoring something. “You missed a bunch. I had my first kiss, Snap ate an entire crate of-”

“Love you, buddy,” Poe says for the thousandths time.

Finn lets out a breathy laugh, and it stings and feels good at the same time. He’s had the practice. Maybe he can do it right this time.

"I love you too, Poe Dameron,” he murmurs quietly, reverently.

Poe pulls back, holding Finn at arms length by the shoulders with his warm, gentle hands and looking at him with his large, sympathetic eyes. For a moment, Finn wonders if he said it wrong again, if he made Poe uncomfortable, if Poe’s about to laugh because Finn has made yet another faux-pas.

But in stead, in a voice too small to really belong to Poe, too quiet to be his loud, overzealous self, too hesitant, to sweet, he asks “Do you mean that?”

Finn looks anywhere but at Poe eyes, bashful all of a sudden.

“I always mean it,” he says, “but when I say it like that, it means 'I'm in love with you,’ right?”

Then he looks at Poe’s face. His lips are slack. His thumb slides over Finn’s cheek. His eyes are wide and searching and open, and when he swallows Finn can hear it. He sees the bob of Poe’s adams apple, the change in his mouth, the way his eyebrows draw together just slightly, thoughts flying around behind his eyes, gears turning.

“I love you, Finn,” Poe says, and oh, wow, _that_ must be what “I’m in love with you” sounds like.

Then they’re kissing. Just like that, so fast Finn almost misses it. Poe smashes their mouths together, and Finn meets him halfway. It’s nothing like his first kiss.

It’s a beginning, Finn thinks, somewhere between hasty kisses and the feeling of Poe’s thumb hooking into his belt loop. The start. It’s like flipping switch that has been waiting for too long, finally crossing the barrier from like to love, finally thinking, “I love Poe Dameron,” in that way that he keeps accidentally saying out loud. He’s just been invited into a part of Poe's life that he didn’t have access to before. He finds himself holding onto Poe like a lifeline, so wholly ready to explore this that he feels like he might explode.

He buzzes with excitement when he thinks about finding every facet of Poe.

“D’you think it’ll mean less if I say it all the time like you do ?” Finn breathes as Poe drags down the collar of his shirt to press a wet kiss to his neck.

“Never,” Poe huffs, his spare hand roaming Finn’s back and chest. “Say it every time you think it.”

But every time Finn thinks it is a lot of times. He says that, and Poe whimpers, and kisses his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> everyone gives finn a kiss


End file.
